Tag Archives: education

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Now when I was a young boy startin' out in this industry
I remember this pearl of wisdom that the internet gave to me.
To manipulate or decorate something on a web page
First ya gotta grab it and there's pretty much just one way...
[Chorus]
Oh selector, oh won't you fetch for me
With your magic sense, all the elements within the old DOM tree.
Now selectors can be used in CSS, oh but there's more.
In plain ol' JavaScript as well with querySelector().
And don't forget the libraries like jQuery and so
You could say that they're essential if you wanna be a pro.
[Chorus]
The next step on your journey is to learn selector syntax.
There's not much to remember so don't worry, just relax.
You start with a plain ol' tag name if you want it to be styled,
Use "plus" for adjacent sibling and "greater than" for a child.
[Chorus]
A dot is for a class name and for IDs it's a hash.
Use square brackets for attributes and you're sure to find a match.
Now :hover needs a colon like :focus and :target.
There's other stuff as well but that's enough to get you started.
[Chorus]
One final word of warning for my song to be complete.
Remember please that all IDs have got to be unique.
They're bad 'n' they're mean and they don't fight clean and you're gonna find it tough
If you use more than one of each because this DOM ain't big enough.
[Chorus x 2]

This is the first of a few articles introducing the way Japanese people communicate with each other. They won’t teach you how to read, write or speak Japanese but they should hopefully be enlightening for people with no previous knowledge. Let’s kick off by looking at the alphabets (yes, plural) that Japanese people use.

Just a bunch of squiggles

The thing that attracted me to Japanese was not manga, anime or robots like many others. It was sumo wrestling and squiggles. On first sight, Japanese looked liked random squiggles but the thought of being able to glance at it and actually know what’s written seemed so cool. I’d be like a spy cracking a secret code! Even now, many years later, I still get a thrill from seeing a bunch of squiggles and understanding (most of) it.

Characters all the way down

It’s commonly said that Japanese has thousands of characters. Yep. But that’s only in one alphabet. There are two further alphabets with much fewer characters. Here’s how they break down:

Alphabet name

No. of characters

Style

Example: kuruma (car)

Hiragana

48

curvy

くるま

Katakana

48

angular

クルマ

Kanji

Up to 50,000 but 2,000-3,000 used daily

fancy

車

Let’s look at these one by one.

Hiragana

Japan is still a pretty sexist country but 1,300 years ago it was much worse. Women were only allowed a lower level of education than men so consequently didn’t use the thousands of Chinese characters (kanji) that men did. Instead, they started using a cursive, simplified form of a handful of kanji to represent sounds and ignored their meaning. For instance, to write kumo (cloud), they could have used derivations of 久 (long time) and 毛 (hair, fur) which, over time, became the hiragana く (ku) and も (mo). This spread from ladies of the imperial court so that eventually men also used hiragana for unofficial writing. It’s now the foundation for reading and writing in modern Japan so if you only learn one Japanese alphabet, make it hiragana.

Katakana

Collectively known as kana, hiragana and katakana are phonetic alphabets and it’s no coincidence that they both have exactly the same number of characters (48) — they each have the same pronunciation and sometimes even look similar. For example the hiragana か (ka) is ヵ (ka) in katakana. This can be confusing but katakana are easy to spot because they look very angular whereas hiragana have curves. But why have two similar alphabets at all? Good question. Katakana developed at about the same time as hiragana but are now used when writing foreign words primarily from Western cultures, such as ロケット (roh-ke-tto) for rocket. They are also used for onomatopoeia and for adding emphasis or a “cool” factor. For example, the word for fashionable is オシャレ (o-sha-re) which, despite being an originally Japanese word, is often written in katakana to seem, well, fashionable.

Kanji

The two characters for the word kanji (漢字) mean “Chinese character” and that is indeed where they came from. Korean also uses various Chinese characters but because of a decree by Mao Zedong in the 1950s to simplify characters to improve literacy in China, modern Chinese characters (except in places such as Taiwan and Hong Kong) can be quite different to those found in Korean and Japanese.

Pronunciation is also a little complex. Some kanji retain their sound from Chinese, e.g. three (三) is pronounced san both in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. Some have evolved slightly over the centuries, e.g. famous (有名) is you-ming in Mandarin Chinese and yuu-mei in Japanese. In other cases there seems to be no similarity. And as if that’s not enough, each kanji has at least two correct ways of pronouncing it in Japanese. More about that in a later article.

But despite these challenges and having thousands of them to learn, for me, kanji are the most beautiful aspect of the Japanese language both in their form and their logic. They range from very simple to very complex and can be works of art in themselves. Some are figurative, for example the character for tree (木) looks sort of like a tree, and some are clearly abstract. Characters can be combined to make a more complex character and can be chained together, most commonly in pairs, to make words. Let’s see a quick example of this.

The kanji for sun is 日 (pronounced hi, ka, nichi or ni).

We’ve already met the kanji for tree (木) but if we add a small line at the bottom to make 本 it now means root or origin (or book, incidentally).

If we chain these two kanji together we get 日本 (ni-hon) meaning origin of the sun, or land of the rising sun, i.e. Japan.

Adding the delightfully simple kanji for person (人) to the end gives us 日本人 (ni-hon-jin), meaning Japanese person.

It’s an old technology but getting a lot of interest recently so I finally got round to doing some experimenting myself (so far an SVG game and a geolocation demo). I still have a long way to go but already I’ve found myself returning to the same few sites when I get stuck. Here they are, in order of complexity:

SVGBasicsEach page is fairly short but it covers the basics (hence the name) and is useful for quickly referring to when you forget an attribute name or syntax.

carto:netNot quite as user-friendly but much more in-depth. The section I keep going back to is Manipulating SVG Documents Using ECMAScript because, with Internet Explorer 9 supporting SVG but not SMIL, this is what you need if you want animation to work in IE.

SVG EssentialsHats off to O’Reilly for making a whole book freely available online. As you’d expect, professionally put together with lots of code snippets and diagrams. There’s also a hard copy version available.

Of course, working for Opera I should also point you to the SVG section of our developer reference site (dev.opera.com). Finally, credit for the graphic goes to Nicu Buculei who has his own collection of public domain SVG clipart.

Do you know of any other good resources or examples for people to learn from? Please add them in the comments.